In the past 30 years, the Aquino family and its supporters had the power to change things. In 12 of those years, during which Cory Aquino and her son Noynoy were president, they were the most powerful people in the land.
But over that period, the people had grown weary of the benign self-righteousness and platitudinous incompetence of the Aquinos and their Yellows, who never really improved the lives of ordinary Filipinos. And the Aquinos and the Yellows, safe in their reality-repelling echo chamber, never saw what was coming until it came up and bit them.
For instance, you’d have thought that, given the Aquino family’s much-publicized hatred for its rival clan, the Marcoses, the Yellows could have done something to prevent Ferdinand Marcos from getting his wish of being buried at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani. But the Yellows never had a law passed in Congress or directed the military to charge its rules concerning who should be buried at its cemetery to prevent the burial from happening.
And when the Marcos burial finally happened last Friday, the Yellows acted like they were all surprised. The burial was like the surreptitious entry of a thief in the night, said one Yellow official, who ironically stands accused of the theft of a million votes while almost everyone slept on the night of May 9; another, who has lately been looking appropriately cadaverous, vowed to have the newly buried remains of the late dictator disinterred.
Such is the selective forgetfulness and aversion to accept any blame of the Yellows, who may have gotten these traits from Noynoy Aquino. They want everyone to believe them on the basis of their earnestness, even if they are so obviously lying— again, another character flaw of their Yellow idol.
Any objective review of the recent events that led to the burial of Marcos will prove just how untenable the Yellows’ position that they were caught by surprise is. Let’s start with the arrival on the national scene of presidential candidate Rodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Davao City.
Last Feb. 19, while campaigning in Ilocos Norte, Mayor Duterte promised to have Marcos buried at the Libingan, which his family said was the late president’s wish before he died. A subservient Congress was still in session at the time and the military was still under the total control of Noynoy.
All it would have taken was a simple law passed to prevent the burial or an even simpler directive to the Armed Forces which owns the cemetery (which would, say, stop the burial there of “all presidents who had been deposed”) and it wouldn’t have happened. Or at the very least, if Duterte won, he would have a much difficult time getting Marcos interred where he wanted.
Shortly after Duterte won, of course, he ordered that Marcos be buried at the Libingan, in fulfillment of his promise. The Yellows ran to the Supreme Court, where they lost, 9-5.
Then, the Yellows didn’t file a motion for reconsideration or secure a restraining order. The Marcos family, seeing no legal impediment to the burial, did just that last Friday in a private ceremony.
And now we are witness to the collective hair-pulling and gnashing of teeth of the Yellows, who say they never expected this. And, when you think about it, they never really did.
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The reason the Yellows were blindsided was because they had started to believe their own propaganda line, which held that no president in his or her right mind would allow the Marcos burial. And there is enough evidence to show that all the presidents in the past 30 years, even if they were not surnamed Aquino, backed away from the issue, so fearful were they of a Yellow political backlash.
But again, the Yellows refused to see that Filipinos and the political climate had changed. Not only did they fail to take seriously the possibility that a pro-burial candidate like Duterte would win, they didn’t think too much of the fact that Bongbong Marcos nearly won the vice presidency with 14 million or so votes (even after the theft in that May 9 night).
Like the Democratic liberal elites who backed Hillary Clinton, the long-ruling Yellow political class failed to see that they were no longer in control. And because they had been such a powerful political force in the past three decades, they felt that not only would Mar Roxas continue their “gains,” his running mate would lead government after winning the 2022 elections, as well.
The Yellows failed to see that they had become irrelevant. And so they were the most surprised when they lost not only the elections but even their long battle to keep Marcos from being buried where he wanted to be buried.
Now, they are calling for a huge rally on November 25, where their main demand will be for Duterte to step down. It matters not to them that since Friday, they haven’t even mustered up a decent crowd at the People Power Monument, where aging, delusional Yellows and their deluded private school-trained millennial surrogates gathered in the sorriest of numbers.
In three decades, the Yellows—because of their own smugness, lack of empathy for the common man and invincible, unrealistic belief in their own influence and permanence—have gone from triumphant to inconsequential. And yet, they still keep getting surprised.
They never knew that the people had tired of their elitist self-righteousness and their lack of caring for the masses. And so they never saw the Yellow train wreck happen, until it did.